48 paign banners of opposition parties. Last year, Hun Sen shouted angrily at re- porters, "Whether you recognize this government or not, you cannot deny the reality of this government"; this year, with his tone mellowed almost to a purr, he was saying that if he lost the election he wowd happily step down and devote his time to improving his golf game. And yet, during the weeks I spent in Cambo- dia as the electoral exercise ratcheted into full gear, I cowd not find a single Cam- bodian who believed that Hun Sen cowd win a tnùy honest election, nor cowd I find one who believed that he wowd ac- cept the reswts if he lost. In mid-July, when the voting was imminent, panic shopping began in Phnom Penh, with people stockpiling rice, oil, sugar, salt-the basic things you'd want in a time of siege. There were rumors of extensive troop movements; businesses began bolting their shutters, and thousands of residents, fearing tur- moil, cleared out of the capital, thus for- going the chance to vote. On Jwy 17th, Hun Sen, who had hardly bothered to campaign, checked into a hospital for an appendectomy, and spent much of the preëlection period in Kremlin-style con- valescence, blaming those who expressed fears for creating a violence-prone at- mosphere. "What constitutes intimida- tion? 1 do not understand intimidation," he told reporters who found him shuf- fling around the hospital courtyard in pa- jamas and slippers, before he returned to the Tiger's Lair, an artillery-ringed fortress in suburban Phnom Penh that he calls home. "1 cowd not even advise my daughter to vote," he said. "I'm not sure she will vote for me." 1 had heard similar spin from a French diplomat 1 met in Phnom Penh, who was very enthusiastic about Hun Sen as a force of stabilio/ "Let's be clear and realis- tic," he said. "We get Hun Sen elected, not tree and fair like in our countries, but O.K., good enough. Then we can have le- gitimacy, diplomacy, investment, order, and these poor people can get on with their lives without political trouble." Such less-than-democratic views are widely shared by foreign diplomats in Phnom Penh, a number of whom sup- ported last month's vote as a way to laun- der Cambodia's international image. After last year's coup, Hun Sen's regime was treated as a pariah by the international community-shut out of the United Na- tions General Assemblv and the Associa- ./ tion of Southeast Asian Nations and de- nied much of the foreign aid on which Cambodiàs feeble economy depends. But as soon as Hun Sen called for a new elec- tion his international stock began to rise. Never mind that United Nations human- rights investigators had implicated Hun Sen's forces in at least a hundred execu- tions and disappearances since the coup and insisted that conditions for a free and fair election did not exist; and never mind that Hun Sen's party had stacked the National Election Commission. A U.N.- organized team of international observers did not even wait for the ballots to be counted, much less for reports of voter intimidation and electoral irregularities to be investigated, before declaring, on the day after the vote, that the election had been "free and fair" enough "to reflect in a credible way the" will of the Cambodian people," and urging "all parties" to "ac- cept and honor the results of the election without any attempt to undermine the original outcome." Hun Sen, triumphant, threatened that if opposition leaders re- fused to become powerless partners in a coalition government-an idea, he said, that "delighted" King Sihanouk-he wowd, in the name of democracy, simply go on ruling as before. "The crude equation being played here on all sides is that elections equal democracy;" one disgusted Western diplo- mat told me, adding, "1 think it's a clear whitewash. 1 think the Secretary-General cowd find himself in a very embarrassing position." Then he said, "But how long is anyone going to worry about it?" Only the United States broke ranks with the U.N., the European Union, and Japan, refusing to help pay for the elections in advance and insisting on making its own assessment of the ex- ercise. The French diplomat 1 met in Phnom Penh considered Washington's position disingenuous. "The Americans want Hun Sen's stability just as much as we do; but they're a little hung up on human rights," he said. This was a novel criticism of Americàs Cambodia policy. But, as Secretary of State Madeleine Al- bright observed last week, 'the real test of Cambodia's democracy will come after the ballots are counted." Even as the international-observer team in Phnom Penh issued its favorable review, Albright remarked, "The only people who, at this stage, deserve congratula- tions are the people of Cambodia who turned out to vote in heavy numbers." Instead of offering congratulations, however, Hun Sen's forces last week began a program of violent retaliations against opposition supporters, forcing dozens of provincial activists to flee their homes in fear for their lives. O N July 9th, the Reuters wire car- ried a story, datelined Mok Kam- pw, Cambodia, about a FUNCINPEC ac- tivist, named Thong Sophal, "who was allegedly tortured to death because of his political affiliation." The article in- cluded these two sentences: "His eyes had been gouged out, his head smashed in, the skin had been stripped from his lower legs and all his fingers and one ear had been cut o human-rights workers said. Police said they suspected Thong Sophal had killed himself" Such stories are an almost daily sta- ple of the news in Cambodia: people killed by grenades hurled into homes, by automatic-weapons fire in a rice paddy, by vigilante mobs. The police generally describe the motive for these killings as robbery or "malice," but a lo- cal human-rights worker told me that HEAD LINE In the early sixties, while Ameri- can Pop art was replacing the soul- searching gestures of Abstract Ex- pressionism with images of Brillo boxes and Donald Duck, a darker, more enigmatic strain of the move- ment emerged in Germany. Sigmar Polke, a leading pioneer of Euro- Pop, began experimenting with the Benday dots of commercial printing just a few months after Roy Lich- tenstein hit on the idea in his comic- strip paintings. A suite of forty gouaches from 1996 entitled ''Music of Unclarifted Origin" is on view at the P S. 1 Contemporary Art Cen- ter, in Long Island City, through August 23rd At its best, Polke's work manages to be simultaneously puz- zling and pretty; in this detail, washes of pure color are overlaid with the crudely rendered image of a devilish male head, as disturbing as it is va- cant. The painting's title is charac- teristically opaque: " 'There's always a pecking order,' says Dagmar Stef- fen and straightens the butter knife."